A Busker’s Opera

The Best of Both Worlds is a performance by Leo Burtin & Ali Matthews: part cabaret, part lecture, and part participatory experiment. It is being developed at ARC Stockton, East Streets Arts (Leeds), and the University of Salford (Manchester). It is supported with lottery funding from Arts Council England.

Informed by their backgrounds as expatriates, the piece takes as its starting point the perceived and real differences between the socioeconomic models in France and the USA, and how the UK seemingly meets in the middle.

Using the archetypes of the 1930s French street singer and the 1950s American door-to-door salesman, this performance blends poetic text, data, song, recorded interviews.

The sum total of these parts is a contemporary spin on a good old-fashioned working-class café-concert.

This performance features Leo Burtin, co-Artistic Director of Making Room.